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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

> or they are inconsistent

Honestly I think a big change that human industry will have to make over the next century is becoming comfortable with intermittent peak power. Some stuff will happen when it is sunny, or windy, and not otherwise. It's not crazy to say "maybe we should only smelt during peak solar hours", and probably not even crazy to say "maybe our bulk freight should only be moving during peak solar hours".

Once you get rid of the need to do energy intensive stuff at night, the power storage problems become a lot easier.

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There is a bunch of options being explored for shorter and longer term energy storage.

One example i ran into recently were concrete blocks that would be heated during periods of excess production, and then the heat converted back into electricity during slumps.

Never mind that smarter, nation wide, grids can allow electricity to flow in either direction depending on where the production and need is.

Yes, and we'll need all of the energy storage we can get, both for applications that do require continuous or on-demand power and for applications which require dense, portable power.

But every transformation you put your energy through between harvesting it and harnessing it has a cost, whether you are converting your electricity between DC and AC willy-nilly, storing it as chemical energy, or converting it to mechanical motion and storing it as gravitational potential. If you have a list industrial application that is not time sensitive, and is running at night from an 80% efficient storage mechanism (effectively, even if off the grid), you can boost your efficiency by 25% by running when it is sunny! Who wouldn't do that?

> Never mind that smarter, nation wide, grids can allow electricity to flow in either direction depending on where the production and need is.

Larger grids are also more vulnerable grids. We should learn from the lessons provided by, e.g. the 2003 blackout in the northeastern U.S. We don't need bigger, more vulnerable, more tempting targets for the bad guys. We need more compartmentalization to limit potential damage and make systems easier to understand and repair.

Domes you can't stop without effectively destroying them? Nah, haven't heard of them.

Or we could invest in a proven carbon free generation technology.

Sure, we should build all the nuclear we can, but we should also build all the solar and wind we can, and we'll still end up with variable peaks.

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